Alternatives to antibiotics exist, but farmers have no way to know when to use them.

…

Growth-promoter antibiotic dosing was disallowed in the United States as of January 1 under a set of measures known as Guidances. Disease prevention and treatment are now allowed only with a veterinarian supervising.

The FDA took those steps because antibiotics given to meat animals contribute to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and thus contribute to the 700,000 deaths and millions of illnesses caused each year by drug-resistant infections.

]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-1384776
Sat, 09 Jul 2016 17:43:33 +0000http://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-1384776Resistance is not only encouraged and spread in medical settings. In many places, more antibiotics are given to farm animals than to people. In America 70% of those sold end up in beasts and fowl. Some of this is to treat disease; most is not. For reasons only dimly understood, many animals put on weight faster when fed these drugs. A lot of these drugs pass into the soil and watercourses, where they further encourage resistance. The bacteria that become resistant this way are unlikely to be human pathogens. But their resistance genes can quite easily get into bugs that are.

Some of the antibiotics farmers use are those that doctors hold in reserve for the most difficult cases. Colistin is not much used in people because it can damage their kidneys, but it is a vital last line of defence against Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella and Enterobacter, two of which are specifically mentioned on the CDC watch list. Last year bacteria with plasmids bearing colistin-resistant genes were discovered, to general horror, in hospital patients in China. Agricultural use of colistin is thought to be the culprit.

The cost of banning antibiotics as growth enhancers would not be great: an American government study suggests it might reduce the bottom line of those who currently use them by less than 1%. The European Union has already enacted such a ban. Despite practical difficulties—the difference between a growth-enhancing dose and a veterinarially defensible prophylaxis may often be in the eye of the beholder—more should follow.

Lord O’Neill favours such prohibitions. He also likes the idea of using more vaccination to head off the need for treatment, both in livestock and in people. Hospital hygiene is another focus; there is some evidence that staff are more careless about cleanliness than they were in pre-antibiotic days, when they saw deaths like Albert Alexander’s on a more regular basis.

]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-1333107
Tue, 05 Jan 2016 19:30:57 +0000http://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-1333107‘Disturbing’ drug-resistant superbug gene has been detected in Canada
The alarming drug-resistance gene MCR-1 that was first detected in China in November has been found in meat sold in Ontario in 2010, the Star has learned. The gene grants bacteria like E. coli resistance to colistin, a powerful antibiotic of last resort.

An alarming new superbug gene that makes bacteria resistant to a last-resort antibiotic has been detected in Canada, the Star has learned.

The gene, called MCR-1, produces an enzyme that makes bacteria invincible to colistin, a highly toxic antibiotic used only when all other drugs have failed.

MCR-1 was first reported in November by scientists in China, who published a paper in The Lancet that set off alarm bells across the globe. Analyzing bacterial samples in southeastern China, researchers found 260 samples of E. coli with the MCR-1 gene on meat, hospital patients and farm animals — the likely source of this new superbug, the paper suggests.

…

Colistin is still rarely used in human medicine because doctors want to conserve the antibiotic’s effectiveness. But polymyxins are often given to livestock animals to prevent infections and promote growth — especially in China, one of the world’s highest users of colistin in agriculture. (While colistin isn’t used in agriculture in Canada, polymyxin B — a similar compound that creates the same resistance problems as colistin — is.)

In 2015, the global market for colistin in agriculture reached nearly 12,000 tonnes and is expected to rise to 16,500 tonnes by 2021, according to the Lancet paper. “That’s insane,” said Dr. Gerry Wright, a microbiologist with McMaster University and expert in antibiotic resistance.

How does the livestock industry talk about antibiotics? Well, it depends on who’s doing the talking, but they all say some version of the same thing. Take the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; they say there is “no conclusive scientific evidence indicating the judicious use of antibiotics in cattle herds leads to antimicrobial resistance in humans [MRSA].”

…

A study in the journal mBio, published by the American Society for Microbiology, shows how an antibiotic-susceptible staph germ passed from humans into pigs, where it became resistant to the antibiotics tetracycline and methicillin. And then the antibiotic-resistant staph learned to jump back into humans.

“It’s like watching the birth of a superbug,” says Lance Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen, in Flagstaff, Ariz.

]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-171423
Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:37:59 +0000http://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-171423Q. Well, that’s certainly not what you’d expect from the media reaction to the paper. How did you reach that conclusion?

A. There is one particular type of resistance found by the researchers that is a big red flag for the influence of farm antibiotics, and that is resistance to the antibiotic tetracycline.

Let’s back up. When someone gets an infection, you give them a drug. Maybe it’s not the right dosage and the bacteria become more resistant to that drug. If the bacteria are never exposed to the drug, it’s unlikely they’ll become resistant.

And indeed, when you look at all the bacteria samples that the Iowa team analyzed you see tetracycline resistance in lots of them. [Whereas] the human strains of MRSA found on the meat were probably put there by a slaughterhouse worker or a butcher or someone handling it in the supermarket.

These results turn this paper on its head. What it says is not, “Oh, farm antibiotics aren’t having that big an effect.” The prevalence of tetracycline resistance in all forms of MRSA tell us that farm antibiotics are a much bigger deal than anybody realized.

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Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:17:14 +0000http://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-111400Emerging infectious diseases that affect livestock and man alike are a threat to health and prosperity. International researchers in Delhi this week met to discuss how new agricultural practices, notably in livestock, affect public health. Livestock not only pass on new diseases to other species, including man, but also help spread existing diseases to new places.

As rural populations in India and elsewhere expand, grow richer and eat more protein, backyards where a few chickens or pigs once scratched have become densely packed smallholdings of several dozen animals. These bring owners more wealth, but also hygiene and veterinary problems. One symptom is the poor quality of meat traded in markets. A 2009 study of pork sold in Nagaland, in the north-east of India, where smallholdings have been flourishing (Christians, fond of pork, are prevalent there), found that 9% of meat contained tapeworm cysts. More than half the customers said that they had seen such cysts in their meat at some time.

]]>By: DDT and evolutionhttps://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-98179
Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:58:21 +0000http://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-98179[…] related situation that I have written about before is the abuse of antibiotics in the livestock industry. Just as the agricultural use of DDT provided […]
]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-82958
Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:11:44 +0000http://www.sindark.com/2007/12/07/meat-and-antibiotics/#comment-82958Big Meat, that new report on antibiotics doesn’t say what you say it says

Posted 12:59 PM on 21 Oct 2009
by Tom Laskawy

The American Academy of Microbiologists (“the world’s oldest and largest life science organization”), just issued a major report on antibiotic resistance which, among many recommendations, calls for decreasing or eliminating the use of antibiotics in animal production. The report adds more support for the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), Rep. Louise Slaughter’s (D-N.Y.) bill before Congress that would end sub-therapeutic doses on antibiotics for livestock.

Research, strategies and stories from the struggle against methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA)

This blog is the virtual whiteboard for my new book, SUPERBUG, coming in March 2010 from Free Press. Whether you’re a MRSA researcher or a MRSA victim — or simply a major disease geek — I’m interested in your leads, thoughts, comments and stories. Watch this space for drafts and details as SUPERBUG moves forward.

A potentially deadly new strain of anti-biotic-resistant microbes may be widespread in our food supply. Protect your loved ones with Prevention’s Special Report.

By Stephanie Woodard , Stephanie Woodard is a New York City-based writer who covers food, gardening, health, and human rights, among other subjects.

About 2 years ago, dozens of workers at a large chicken hatchery in Arkansas began experiencing mysterious skin rashes, with painful lumps scattered over their hands, arms, and legs. “They hurt real bad,” says Joyce Long, 48, a 32-year veteran of the hatchery, where until recently, workers handled eggs and chicks with bare hands. “When we went and got cultured, doctors told us we had a superbug.” Its name, she learned, was MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This form of staph bacteria developed a mutation that resists antibiotics (including methicillin), making it hard to treat, even lethal. According to the CDC, certain types of MRSA infections kill 18,000 Americans a year–more than die from AIDS.